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Necromancy
If there is one thing that both arcanists and commoners can agree on, it’s that the dead should stay dead. Death and the afterlife is too mysterious, too dangerous and too godforsaken to meddle with. However, some dark souls practice the damning Arcana of Necromancy. Necromancy is not only a way to invigorate the dead, but also to bring about unnatural chills of the grave, spiritual screams and visions of your demise. Necromancers are a vile sort and many obviously obscure their craft. In performing blasphemous and grotesque experiments on both the dead and the living, they fall deeper into madness, their skin becoming jaundiced and clinging to their bones, giving them a corpse-like visage. The worst Necromancers straddle the line between preserving life and attempting to cheat death, many in the search for immortality through lichdom. Blasphemous in the extreme, Necromancy goes against of a core tenet of the 9 Gods; Good things never last. The immoral elves and their Immortals, the Tarrasque and demons are all denied the afterlife and cannot cross the River Styx to be judged by the Custodian. History Necromancy is a relatively recent creation, from the year 1013AB. Redstone Worm was a Funerary Mage sponsored by the Blackgate Temple for scholarship. He was an brilliant scholar, pushing the limits of magical theory and regularly calling upon ancient souls to learn forgotten secrets. His frequent conversations with ghosts, although they could not tell him what lay beyond the veil, revealed enough to him that he did not want to die. He studied for years, discovering the secret soulbinding techniques of the dwarf's Living Ancestors, summoned and interrogated demons and eventually culminated in the kidnapping and dissection of an Elven Undying. After years of work, he had achieved true necromancy; not the Funerary Mage's power to call on death and communicate with spirits, but ''control ''over death. He learned to bind the spirit to physical forms from the dwarfs, how to twist, break and heal the flesh from the Tarrasque and how to stave off death forever from the Elves. Organisation Necromancy is taught from master to apprentice, or learned from forbidden tomes. The majority of necromancers belong to The Order of The Worm, a group headed by Redstone Worm. A hidden cult, it often recruits from surgeries, libraries and mundane colleges, staying away from the areas influenced by the Custodian and his priests. Very few Cultists are actually taught anything of necromancy, and are simply promised an eternal life free from the consequences of judgement by the Custodian. They funnel funds, controlled substances and texts and most importantly, bodies to the necromancers, who perform their foul work towards their own ends. While a loose fraternity, they often plot against one another in order to gain power. It is led by the first lich, who puts down any usurpers with overwhelming force, traditionally by a tenebrae assassin, although direct intervention is sometimes called for, especially when dealing with another lich. Liches While freedom from dying is a mark of enormous prestige, it offers no authority in the Order, and the new lich must trust Redstone with one of their 4 phylacteries, as well as confide in him where they keep the others. Abilities Necromancy is versatile, with powers to kill foes, preserve and restore the user's flesh, bind souls to inanimate objects or dead bodies to create servants, as well as bind the powers of undead to the necromancer, such as a banshee's wail or the immaterial form of a ghost.